America is just a few days away from the Fourth of July and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That day may involve fireworks, a backyard cookout, and possibly a rendition or two of the Star Spangled Banner. Our national anthem hits home with my guest on APR Notebook. Mobile area author Watt Key is known for his classic novel “Alabama Moon,” which was made into a motion picture. But, he's also an indirect descendant of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.” I'll ask him about that Key family connection and his love of the swamps of the Mobile Tensaw Delta. That's next on APR Notebook.
PAT DUGGINS-- Watt Key, thank you so much for joining me on APR Notebook.
WATT KEY-- Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
PAT-- Did a little bit of surfing before we got together. One thing that I looked into was unusual places where famous writers like to write. Agatha Christie supposedly liked to write when she was in the bathtub. Maya Angelou, the story goes, would rent hotel rooms and take all the pictures off the walls and write there. Truman Capote says that he liked to write in bed. Now, did I read right that you like to write in your swamp camp on the Mobile Tensaw River Delta. Did I get that right?
WATT—Well, you know, I hear that a lot, and I think people, I think people like to imagine a lot of writers as standing around, you know, down at the beach with billowing curtains and in a smoking jacket and a cup of coffee, walking around, thinking about things, and for me it's never been like that. People like to think that I go up to my swamp camp and sit there and immerse myself in that environment, five miles out in the middle of nowhere, and write material, but actually it couldn't be further from the truth, I do have a lot of outlets like that, and I spend a lot of time at those outlets, but I'm usually just there to meet local people, piddle at the camp, and basically do what normal people would do in that type of a setting, and but I do all of my writing. If I'm going to write, I need to be at my desk with no distractions, not looking out the window. It's a, it's a sit down and get it done for two hour job, and I need to be in the same place, same routine to really be productive, I can't just be out in the middle of the swamp with with boats and fishing gear and mosquitoes and all of that kind of thing going on, so I really don't write in places like that, but I do spend a lot of time there to get ideas, and I come back with those ideas and put them down.
PAT-- For the term swamp camp, Mrs. Duggins, and I...when you say “roughing it,” that for us that means waiting for room service. So, when you talk about a swamp camp for the uninformed, what do you mean?
WATT-- So, swamp, the swamp camp you're thinking of is a cabin I built out in the Mobile Tensaw Delta, and you can only get there by in a small John boat, and it's five miles from any, any road through in the middle of the swamp, and you have to have, you have to haul everything up there that you build with little boats full of two by fours and pilings and things like that, you have a gas generator that runs your power, you bring up your own water, so it's, it's very remote and and isolated and without many conveniences, so that's what I call the swamp camp.
PAT-- So you wrote about that in your book, Among the Swamp People by University of Alabama Press, and I get the impression, first of all, you're not alone there, and I understand that the locals, who were already well established, they didn't necessarily cotton up to you initially.
WATT-- Yeah, not at first, because when I first got there, there weren't a lot of camps out there, and the camps that had been there had had been there for a while, and those people knew each other, and these aren't exactly the kind of people that, that you're going to, you know, run, run into down in, you know, in Destin, the this is this is a different kind of waterfront enjoyment going on out there, and you know they're. Alligator hunting and catfishing, and it's, you know, nobody's out there checking, checking licenses. It's, it's pretty, it's the wild west.
PAT-- And you got shot at once or twice?
WATT-- I did get shot at one night. We were on a, me and my brother, and I believe my brother-in-law were on a creek way back in the middle of nowhere, and we ran across a couple of boats that were pulled up in the marsh, and we stopped there, and you know, as was typical, you know, we had had a few beers, and we're just sitting around talking, sipping beer, and somebody made a comment about wonder whose boats those are, and we were talking a little too loud, and the next thing we knew some lights are coming through the coming through the swamp at us, and they shot a couple of times our way. I don't know if they were shooting at us or not. I want to say they weren't, but you could hear the bullets, they were shooting over our head, at least, and so we, we got out of there. I don't know what we ran up on, but whatever. I don't know if they thought we were trying to steal their boats or if there was something they were doing they didn't want us to see. I'm not sure what was going on, but they didn't like us there.
PAT-- Obviously, the swamp area, a big part of your life, but you grew up in Point Clear on Alabama's eastern shore. You once said that Point Clear is a place that can fuel a young person's imagination. Can you talk about that?
WATT-- Yeah, so when I was growing up in Point Clear, it was not what it is today. It was not a year-round community, it was mostly a summertime community for people from Mobile, and so my grandfather, in fact, had built that house and stayed in Texas, but they would come summer there and spend their summers there, and then go back to Texas, and then when my father got out of law school. He married my mother, who was from Mobile, and that house was there, so they moved into it temporarily, which became permanent after a while. And you know that's why I grew up there. And so back to, you know, it not being really a full-time community, I only had really one boy my age nearby, and the summertimes were fun, because I was, I was set up to entertain all my friends from Mobile that would come over, but once summer was gone, the winter times were pretty windswept and lonely, and the bay was rough, and, and so I spent a lot of time in the woods behind our house, building tree forts, you know, just by myself, and had had a lot of pets to keep me company, and then in the summertime they're full of fun, taking people fishing, had my own boat since I was about 12 that I would, I could take to my grandparents, who just lived up the beach, could take it to church, and I could even take it to school. My school was on the bay, and so a lot of time outdoors, a lot of time thinking for yourself, figuring things out, a lot of ingenuity involved. We to make things happen, make adventures happen, so it was, you know, like you remembered. I mean, they weren't video games, there weren't things like that. You had to use your imagination to keep you occupied, so it was, and it was a great place to keep you occupied, always something to do outside.
PAT-- Now, during this time, I understand you wrote your first story when you were 11, and you know, obviously, you know, considerable success since then, but at what point did you think, yeah, I gotta think I'm gonna make a go of this as a writer?
WATT-- Probably not until I was in college did I think I'm gonna make a go of this, but I had an interest early on, you know. Part of my childhood was reading a lot, and I think that's important for writers to read a lot, so that you, you absorb the rhythm of storytelling as much as, as learning, but you, you grasp what it feels, what a good story feels like, and sort of the mechanics of it, without really having to study it. The more you read, the more you sort of know how to imitate what you're seeing and feeling. So, because I like to read so much, I started writing stories when I was young to emit, try to imitate that, to try to do that myself, and I think that I just did it enough to where I got good at it, and I was just doing it more than other people, because I liked it.
PAT—It seems like your work leans toward books for young people. Was that kind of intentional, or the way things evolved, or what do you think?
WATT-- No, it wasn't intentional. At all, I think that the books I read, the most of my reading was done when I was in middle school. That's when I really just consumed a lot of books, and so I think the result of that was I started writing books, and it's trying to write books like those that I remembered really enjoying. I was never an English student, didn't take but just freshman English in college, so I never knew a whole lot about.. I was never reading things like Dostoevsky. I never read any Shakespeare, so really my exposure was to those books I really liked in middle school, like Where the Red Fern Grows, you know, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Hardy Boys, that kind of stuff. And so when I started writing in college as a non-English person, that's what I'm writing, trying to write that kind of stuff, and didn't even know I was writing kids books, as a matter of fact, “Alabama Moon.” I didn't even write it for kids, and they told me this is a kids book, and I said, "Okay, well, whatever. My goal had always been to get one book in the library, that's all I wanted. I remember being in the library when I was in high school, and thinking, wouldn't that be cool? How hard can it be just to be one of those, you know, look at all these books, how hard can it be just to have one? So that's that was really my goal in college, was I just want to get one book in there, and so yeah, that I guess that answers the question, maybe.
PAT-- Well, I mean, if you have to hang your hat on one book, I mean, I guess “Alabama Moon” would kind of like be it, because, like, you know, named to the Time magazine's list of 100 best young adult books ever. Where were you, and what were you doing when that news broke that you were receiving an honor of that magnitude?
WATT-- You know, to be honest with you, I don't remember where I was, that that's, that's probably, I guess, the biggest headliner type accolade that I, that I received, but really, there's other awards for kids' books that are probably, you know, mean more in that community, you know. So, Eb Wipers, that was a big deal, that was probably the biggest deal. Yeah, and so, you know, I went to went to New York and got an award for that, and that was, that was probably the closest I got to sort of a Nobel Prize kind of thing, or a Pulitzer or something like that, and what I was doing that was sort of up at that tier, because you know that award was only given to one person that year, so it was, you know, that was the biggest deal for me was that particular award.
PAT-- Well, for the uninitiated, the EB White Award, because you're talking about, you know, reading stuff when you were young, when you know I was really young, you know, “Charlotte's Web” was kind of like, you know, a big one for me, Stuart Little, but EB White wrote Charlotte's Web, and I could just.. I could just.. I could just imagine what that was like for you, man. That must have been cool.
WATT-- Yeah, it was pretty cool. I was.. I was really happy with that one.
PAT-- Now, getting back to your swamp camp for just a moment.. that's one thing, but in your story collection, Bay Boy, you write about, like, drinking pine needle tea and eating pine nuts as a youngster, and you know, having, having, you know, red Alabama moon, all of those things kind of figure into, you know, what the lead character does there. So, how much, how much of how much of Moon is you?
WATT-- Um, well, I think that all of your characters have a lot of you in them. I mean, they think the same things are funny, the same things are sad, they're interested in the same kinds of things, for the most part. So, there's a little bit of you that comes out in all the characters, this specific thing you're talking about, the pine needle tea, and all that. When I was in, a lot of people think that this was really the start of Alabama moon, and it probably was when I was in college. Well, I'll back up. So, I told you I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up, and I was very interested in survival type stuff, building forts and fires, and sleeping out in the woods, and skidding animals, and making things out of their skins, and having weird pet exotic pets and things, so I was always interested in sort of outdoor stuff. When I was in college at Birmingham Southern, I designed a survival course where I would go live out in the woods for two weeks with nothing but the clothes I wore in and a bow and a. Row, and like a skillet, we had limited supplies. It was me and two of my buddies, and we did it for college credit. And we went and lived out in the woods in South Alabama for two weeks, and basically lived off of things like pine needle tea, a couple armadillos, some snakes, rabbit, and really, didn't have a lot to eat. We, we probably would have died had we been, you know, real Native Americans or something. But that was my idea, to try to live like a Native American. And we weren't very good at it, but we did it. We stayed out there for 14 days, and I lost 15 pounds. I think it was 145 pounds when I went in, and I was 130 when I came out, and in, I wrote a journal, kept, kept, kept a journal while I was out there, and later, years later, I would come back to that journal when I wrote Alabama Moon, to sort of remember what a lot of it was like, and it really, I think, brought some authenticity to that book that I had experienced some of those feelings of just loneliness and hunger, and what things like snake taste like and armadillo, and so yeah, that's been a good coffee table conversation, that that trip, a lot of people like to hear about that. There's a lot more to it, but it was, you know, definitely “Alabama Moon” pulled from that experience.
PAT-- I don't know if anybody remembers the days of vinyl LPs, but I remember a singer, Kenny Rogers, once said the difference between a song and a hit is what happens between the grooves, and I was wondering, when did you realize “Alabama Moon” was a hit?
WATT-- Um, well, gosh, I guess when they told me it was, I'd been doing it for so long. I mean, you gotta, you gotta remember this was my 10th book, and that I, that I wrote, and so I thought my first one that I wrote, my first novel that I wrote when I was a freshman in college, I thought that was the best thing ever, and then you know it didn't sell, so I wrote my second one. I thought, oh well, this is going to be the best one ever, it's definitely good, and you think that the whole time, and then finally I just.. and I'm doing all this really in the dark. I have no writer friends. I don't know how long this is going to take. I don't really know if I'm that good. I mean, I have my wife and my mom and my friends telling me all this stuff's good, but you know they're going to tell you that anyway.
PAT-- This is the National Award-winning “APR Notebook” on Alabama Public Radio. I'm Pat Duggins. My guest today is Mobile Area writer Watt Key, author of numerous books like “Among the Swamp People” by University of Alabama Press, and his classic “Alabama Moon.” Speaking of which, I asked him what it was like when Hollywood came calling?
WATT—I well, you know, most writers that have reasonable successful books, Hollywood comes knocking, and, but usually it's just in the form of an option, they'll tie up your book and say, you know, we want to hold on to this. We might make a movie, we might not, and they pay you a little bit of money, and you know that that's that is pretty typical for it to actually get made is not typical. So I guess in a long way, what I'm saying is the movie option happened, and I have by that time writer, professional writer friends that I'd met since I was now published, going to New York, dealing with all this, and they're like, "Oh yeah, you got the movie option, don't worry, it won't ever get made, and so it, you know, and then I'm slowly just trickle fed information, oh yeah, you know, they, they've got so and so wind up, they got so and so wind up all the while. My friends are like, don't worry, it always falls apart. And then all of a sudden one day they called me, said, Hey, we're we're going to start filming, you know, next week in Louisiana, you want to come over and come on the set? I'm like,
PAT-- Yeah, now this may be Hollywood lore. Correct me if I'm wrong. Here, I heard that six months into the production they decided they didn't like the screenplay, and everybody's like, "Does anybody have Watt Key’s phone number? And all of a sudden, they asked you to do it. Now, for you, initially, was that a good thing, or like, "yay, or is it like, "oh no, they want me to do what?
WATT-- Yeah, so that happened before, before they started filming. They had hired this guy in LA to write the screenplay, because normally the writer of the book is not involved in the movie, and so they hired this guy in LA to write the screenplay, and they didn't like it, so. They called me and asked me if I wanted to write it, and I had never written a screenplay before, and I told them, I said, "I've never done this before, and they said, "Oh, what, you can do it, and I said, "Well, I'm going to need a few months to study this, and they're like, "Yeah, well, you know, take some time and see, and we want to see what you can do, so, and they paid me to do it, so I mean, I had a.. I had a.. it was a nice little, little bit of money, so I was like, okay, yeah, I'll do it. And for me, what helped, though, was I was able to see what that first guy had done, and the reason you usually don't have the novel writer as writing the screenplay is because they're too close to the material, and they can't cut out enough to make it as compact as you need it to be to be a film, because a film follows a very strict compact story arc, and you got to leave out a lot of side plot, you got that's why when you watch the movie it never gives you the satisfaction that that the novel did, because you're missing so much subplot and side story that you don't come away with that same impact.
PAT-- This is gonna sound crazy, but John Goodman is in this movie, and Clint Howard is in this movie. Do you, do you keep up with the cast at all, or are you close to them at all?
WATT-- I did not meet John Goodman, because the way they do it is he was the most expensive guy in the movie, and so they will typically, they don't film things in order, they'll take all John Goodman's scenes and do them all like in a couple of days to get him in and out, and so when I first got, when I got to the set, they were not, you know, his stuff, he was on another movie somewhere, so they weren't doing his stuff. So I met Quinn Howard, was there, and another guy named JD Evermore, who plays the main character's dad, and all the kids were there, and so I met, I met most, most of the people, but not John Goodman. I still keep up with JD Evermore, and I haven't talked to Clint since then, not for any particular reason. I just, you know, just did, I just haven't, but the kids have since a couple of the kids have since gone on to do pretty big things, and I actually, I gave them all pocket knives, I gave them all a present when I was there, and one of the kids, Gabe Basso, who's big now in this series called the what, the night watchman, or something.
PAT—"The Night Agent.”
WATT--Yeah, “The Night Agent,” yeah. And I sent him a little note when his show first came out, saying, hey, you know, glad you, glad you made it, you know, great show, you know, good luck. I had, I never heard back from him, but he was really the nicest kid on the set. A couple of the kids were kind of affected, and, but you could tell he was going to go somewhere just because he was, he was just real polite, and you know, just a nice kid. And they, you know, they went to school while they were there, they had a school trailer, and so they would go film some things, and they would go into the trailer, and they had a teacher that went around with them, and they would have class, and then come back out and do some stuff. It was interesting.
PAT-- I'm glad you brought up Gabriel Basso, because one of the ways I frequently torture Mrs. Duggins is we'll be sitting there, and we're watching streaming, and I'll say, "Oh, that actor that we're watching here, he was also in this movie, in this movie, in this movie, this movie,” and she'll roll her eyes, and then have to roll everything back because of the dialog that I talked over. And when we started watching “The Night Agent,” I'm kind of like, "Wait a minute, that guy is so familiar. And after the cover of my copy of Alabama Moon, I said, "Holy smoke, it's Hal, the tough kid!”
WATT-- That's right, yeah, yeah, he's, he's done real well, and like I said, you could tell that he was going to go far, even back then, that was his first, that was his first acting job.
PAT-- And you knew him back when. WATT—Yeah.
PAT-- Well, tell you, well, Mr. Key, as we start to wrap up this, this is going to be part of the talk where you're going to go, ‘Oh no, he's going to ask me about this,’ but here goes, and I hope you'll indulge me. Our conversation is going to air about two or three days before America celebrates its 250th birthday, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and I was wondering, when did you first learn that you were a descendant of Francis Scott Key?
WATT-- Yeah, well, to clarify, I'm not really a direct descendant. We share an uncle, well, his, I come down from his uncle, so, but it's probably the most famous people. We can connect to, although we can connect to F. Scott Fitzgerald, his mother was a key, so there's a few things like that that we can, we can connect ourselves to, but I like to think that, you know, maybe some, some writer, some writer, gene flowed down through the keys and went over to him and came down my side a little bit. I don't know, it's fun to think about, but yeah, that comes up a lot. People ask me about it, and, and we do do claim him, even though I'm not directly descended from him.
PAT-- How would you grade his poetry? I mean, the, oh, say, can you see, and so on and so on..?
WAT-- I think I can do better. It's pretty complicated. I don't.. it sure is a hard, sure is a hard song to sing, isn't it?
PAT-- Although the notes are super high, I could never do it in 1000 years, but.. but.. but speaking of that, I mean, was.. was there a time before you were told about this that you might have been either at a ball game or watching one on television, and somebody does the Star Spangled Banner, and then somebody mentions, "Hey, you're an indirect descendant of this. And then what was, was there a before and after for you in terms of, like, you know, the significance of the Star Spangled Banner when you hear
it?
WATT-- Um, I just don't think anybody really makes the connection until I tell them about it. Nobody, nobody has really ever come up to me and say, said, 'Hey, you know, it's usually me saying, hey, you know, but I do remember I was in New York. This was after I'd published a couple of books, and I was up in New York with my editor, and we're walking around getting lunch, and we walked through a park, and there was a statue of Francis Scott Key, and I said, you know, I'm related to him, and he looked at me, and he said, you never told me that. I'm like, yeah, he's like, man, that he was so impressed, like, I.. I didn't.. I just was surprised that he was that impressed, and I thought, well, maybe I'd have gotten published sooner if I'd have used.. if I'd used this, you know, information, but I just threw it out, and he was, he was really impressed by it.
PAT—Author Watt Key, I could list his books forever, but most recently I've read “Among the Swamp People” and “Bay Boy” by University of Alabama Press, and of course, the classic “Alabama Moon.” I'm not going to say anything about Time magazine, we'll just stick with the EB White Award, and be happy with that. Watt Key thank you so much for joining me on APR Notebook.
WATT-- Yeah, thank you so much, Pat. I appreciate it.
PAT-- I mentioned how APR Notebook is now a national award-winning program, many thanks to the Public Media Journalists Association for recognizing APR with a national second place award for best interview program. APR Notebook is also available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. The student interns in the APR newsroom are Matt Moran, Brooke Goodrich, Alex Schoenfeld, Vivian Lang, Alexis Barone, Cater Costa, Bella Steiert, Nicole Dejana, John Underwood, Josie Malave, and Sarah Murph. I'm Pat Duggins. We'll see you next time on APR Notebook.
